Pellet Gun Use to Quell Protesters Back Under the Scanner in India

He is one of at least four young Indians treated for pellet injuries after that march, and the first confirmed use of this weapon on protesters anywhere in the national capital.

Lochab, a Delhi University distance-learning student preparing for the police recruitment exam, was shuttled between three hospitals before surgeons began removing metallic pellets from his eye, his lung and the fat surrounding his heart.

Twenty-five-year-old Sheik Irshad Mansoori of Jabalpur is in another ward with a pellet still lodged near a blood vessel in his neck, too dangerous to extract. He says he saw an RAF man in blue camouflage uniform aim a weapon in his direction before the pellets struck his face, neck, and eyebrow.

Delhi Police say none of this happened, that no pellet guns were used, and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), whose Rapid Action Force battalions were deployed alongside Delhi Police that day, has simply not responded.

Alt News, a fact-checker site, geolocated video from the march and placed both Mansoori and Lochab within a few hundred meters of footage showing an RAF person raising what an ammunition expert identified as a 12-bore pump-action weapon.

The Delhi High Court, unconvinced by denials alone, has directed all agencies to preserve every frame of video from the day while Federal Health Minister J.P. Nadda visited the injured in hospital — an odd courtesy to extend to men supposedly hurt by nobody in particular.

How does a paramilitary unit policing a student protest in the national capital come to be carrying a weapon that has no business anywhere near a crowd?

The pellet gun was not designed for this, and the Indian Ordnance Factory in Pune, which manufactures it, has certified the weapon for scaring animals and hunting birds.

It fires up to six hundred lead pellets per cartridge at a thousand feet per second, from a twelve-bore pump-action shotgun that offers no precision whatsoever.

It was never meant to be aimed at a human face but has been used, repeatedly, since 2010, when the CRPF first introduced it in Kashmir as a supposedly “non-lethal” alternative to live ammunition, which kills.

However, the term “non-lethal” has done a great deal of dishonest work over the past decade and a half, largely in Kashmir, especially since the summer of 2016.

In months of unrest in the Kashmir valley, the CRPF told the Jammu and Kashmir High Court it had fired a million pellets in just thirty-two days and admitted candidly that standard operating procedure was abandoned given the scale of the protests.

Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital alone treated over 446 patients for pellet eye injuries within a month, and by the time the dust settled, more than 6,000 people had been hit, over 1,100 of them in the eyes.

Insha Mushtaq Malik was fourteen years old, standing at the window of her own home, when more than a hundred pellets struck her face. She lost both eyes.

Amnesty International documented 88 such cases of blinding between 2014 and 2017 in a report bluntly titled “Losing Sight in Kashmir,” and called for the weapon to be banned outright. Human Rights Watch said much the same.

Then Federal Home Minister Rajnath Singh, now the country’s Defense Minister, cautioned security forces to use the gun “sparingly” — a caution that, by his own government’s later admission in court, changed almost nothing on the ground.

Kashmir’s High Court Bar Association pointed out the plain absurdity at the heart of the policy — a weapon certified by the manufacturer for use on birds and animals was being fired into the faces of Kashmiri children and young men.

Nine years on, no ban has followed.

The weapon, in fact, has now traveled 2,000 kilometers to the Jantar Mantar protest site in the national capital.

Pellet guns have never been reported in crowd control anywhere in the national capital before last week, and their appearance here must mark something more than a policing decision.

It marks a normalization — an acceptance that a weapon judged too dangerous and too indiscriminate even by the government’s own courts in Srinagar can nonetheless be aimed against students demanding an education minister’s resignation.

Civil society groups note the denial, the silence from the paramilitary command, the burden placed on injured young men and their families to somehow prove what was done to them.

Government culpability here is not really in doubt, whatever Delhi Police chooses to say into a microphone, and the hospital visit by a senior Cabinet minister, a former president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), confirms the government knew, within a day, that grievous injuries consistent with pellet fire had occurred.

Activists are demanding a magisterial inquiry with the power to summon RAF and CRPF commanders, an independent forensic examination of every pellet extracted from Lochab, Mansoori and the other two known victims, and above all a public accounting of who authorized a Kashmir-origin weapon for use in the capital.

The All India Catholic Union, the 107-year-old Laity movement, has demanded an official White Paper into the government’s handling of the massive protest over the mess in the country’s education system and the corruption in its examinations, which left scores of students depressed to the point of taking their own lives.

Answerability cannot rest on a Delhi High Court order to preserve video footage alone, welcome though that order is, in times when the government can force even international social media giants to obey its bidding.

C. UCA News